Tinkering

Installing KiCAD on Mac OS X

8 December 2011 Tinkering
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Recently I got more and more fed up by EAGLE CAD. It is a good EDA tool. But the restrictions are really starting to bother me. I need to do more 4 layer boards. Perhaps bigger boards. And I do not want to invest some thousand Euros just to be able to design bigger boards [...]

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Blinken Button as a SPI Display

25 January 2011 Tinkering
Blinken Button with SPI breakout

There is nothing better than happy and even creative customers! At 27C3 Johannes and Gabe were one of the first customers for the Blinken Button Kit. After some minor issues they managed to assemble their kit. But that was positively not enough for them.  They wanted to use the Blinken Button as SPI slave, so [...]

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Palo Altonale – Learn Tinkering at the Good School

27 July 2010 Tinkering
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A short German sumary, English version after the click: Auf zur Palo Altonale! Zusammen mit Tinkerlog, Palo Altona und Interactive Matter bietet die Good School einen Kurs zu Physical Computing & Tinkering in Hamburg an. Ziel des Workshop ist es Kreativen in 2 Tagen die Umsetzung von interaktiven Physical-Computing-Projekten auf Basis von Arduino zu vermitteln.Wer [...]

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Developing Software for the Atmel AVR with AVR-Eclipse

22 July 2010 Tinkering
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Developing software – or better firmware – for the Atmel AVR can be quite easy or quite complicated. A lot of people like to just use vi, some source files and a make file. Here at Interactive Matter we are a tad lazy and want a fully fledged IDE, with code completion, one click building, [...]

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Palo Altona will build Hamburg’s first Makerbot

9 April 2010 Tinkering
MaerBot Cupcake CNC by Bre Petis

Palo Altona is happy to announce that we will build the first MakerBot Cupcake CNC in Hamburg (at least according to Google). Good School approached Alex of Tinkerlog, me and Palo Altona in general, if we want to help to build their MakerBot. And yes we are happy to help. The weekend project will be [...]

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Palo Altona – Hamburg Tinker Drinkup

14 January 2010 Tinkering
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Die deutsche Version gibt es nach dem Klick (und dann weiter unten). This time it is all non-technical (technically not – but that starts to get complicated). To further encourage tinkering in Hamburg, Alex and I have established a regularly tinker drinkup every Thursday (nearly) at Saal II. Currently it is a very cosy drinkup, [...]

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Seasonal Greetings

20 December 2009 Tinkering
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This is definitively the last post for this year. So I wish everybody Merry Christmas or whatever you want to celebrate and a pleasant & successful new year! Even I stopped tinkering and went on to hacking cookies. Have fun & take care!

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Filtering Sensor Data with a Kalman Filter

18 December 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I wrote about noise with a LIS302DL accelerometer. There is obviously something wrong with my hardware. But before I get a new version out I need to implement some software filtering. After some unsuccessful results with low pass filters I choose the Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter involves an awful lot of [...]

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Decoupling LIS302DL – There I fixed it!

15 December 2009 Tinkering
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As you probably know, I really like I2C sensors and especially the LIS302DL. But adding this accelerometer to your circuit is not as straight forward as I thought. But in the end I got it quite right. It all started out with a 0.1µF ceramic capacitor. For good measure I put a ferrite bead in [...]

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Driving Circuits from a CR2032 Lithium Coin Cell

29 August 2009 Tinkering
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Just another good example of ‘lesson learned’. I often use the very common CR2032 coin cell batteries to drive my circuits. Small, cheap, easy to get and there is a quite a range of good and cheap battery holders. But recently I have tested an complete over the top design which pushed the poor little [...]

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Interactive Matter: The first year!

11 August 2009 Tinkering
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Unbelievable that this is just the first year of Interactive Matter. But still there happened a lot of things. Lets have a look on what Interactive Matter has managed to achieve.

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Arduino & AD7746

18 July 2009 Sensors
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In my ongoing series about cool sensors Interactive Matter presents the AD7746 capacity sensor: What is a capacity sensor good for? You can of course make a device to identify small capacitance (up to 4pF) but that’s boring. Much more interesting is how it reacts to touching. Read on how to connect it to the [...]

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Doing business with makepcb.com

17 June 2009 Tinkering
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Trying a new board house is always an adventure. Of course I use BatchPCB for small scale prototyping. But for an upcoming project I needed some higher quantity of boards for a cheaper price. So some ‘real’ board house must be found. There are so many options, that I do not try to list all [...]

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64 Pixels Roundup

20 May 2009 Tinkering
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As a effect of the Space Invaders Button I learned a lot about all those LED Matrix projects on the net. As a roundup I collected a short overview of all the different projects I found.

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SFH 3310 & SFH 5711 Light Sensors

18 May 2009 Sensors
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After I successfully shed some light its time to see some light. For this you normally use photo diodes, photo transistors or photo resistors. But there are two nice little detectors which I came across, special enough to post them here: The Osram SFH 3710 and SFH 5711. Both are photo diodes respectively transistors adapted [...]

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Low Voltage RGB LED

9 May 2009 Tinkering
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Most of my parts want a 3.3V voltage supply. Most of my projects relay on a single coin cell battery at 3V. But driving an RGB LED from 3V is no fun at all. Lets take for example a nice strong RGB LED like the Osram LRTB G6TG – the green channel runs at 3.2V, [...]

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